Free Blessings by Anna Quindlen

two of them had gotten a double-wide trailer that looked just like a house and came with the curtains already hung and the wallpaper already on the walls. Skip said that he was getting out in four and a half months. They hadn’t really had a lot to talk about.
    He wondered what was in the letter his father had sent him. He wondered if Debbie was always late to work, or just tonight, to torture him.
    He didn’t even hear Chris come up beside him until he felt the iron arm around his neck. Chris smelled of beer and pot smoke, and he had a bruise on his face that looked fresh. His freckled face had that puffy creased look that had come with sleeping in, drunk, when they were younger, but that just became the way you looked if you slept in, drunk, for enough years. He had a tattoo on his upper arm, the Tasmanian Devil. He’d gotten it one night at aplace at the beach in Virginia when the four of them were all together, sleeping in one room at a Motel 6. Skip had gotten sunburned and he hurt all over, and when the tattoo artist had put the first needle in, to put a lightning bolt on the back of his hand, he’d seen black stars in his peripheral vision, and come to on a cot in the back with an egg coming up on the side of his head. “I’m not doing that, dude,” the tattoo guy said flatly. “I got a policy.”
    The Tasmanian Devil arched his round belly as Chris picked up his beer. “Where you been, Skippy?” he said. “How come I never see you anymore?”
    “You need me to drive you again?” Skip said.
    “Don’t be a wiseass, man. You know I never wanted to fuck you up.”
    Skip knew that in some twisted way that was true. He and Chris had been friends since first grade. He’d always stuck by Chris, even in fourth grade, when Chris got the ski jacket from Santa Claus, the really good one with the fleece lining, wore it to school, all proud, and then caught Robert Bentemenn, whose father was a lawyer and a magistrate and something-or-other with the chamber of commerce, staring at it.
    “That’s my old jacket that my mom gave away to the Salvation Army,” Robert’d said, and Chris was on him, bam bam bam. Half the class jumping on Chris’s back couldn’t stop his arm from going up and down, up and down. The jacket went into the Dumpster behind Newberry’s, once Chris found Bentemenn’s name written inside the pocket in indelible marker, and Chris had to go to counseling, and the counselor told his mom he had poor impulse control. Memorial Day weekend last year his impulse had been to hold up the Quik-Stop, and Skip had been stupid enough to be driving. Chris hadn’t really meant any harm, but that hadn’t made ten months running laundry through an industrial mangle any easier to take for Skip.
    “How’s life in the Magic Kingdom?” said Chris, and Skip shrugged. “They need any part-time help out there, ‘cause I just got laid off from my sheetrocking job?”
    Skip shrugged again. It froze him, to think of Chris anywherenear Blessings, or the baby. He looked at his watch. Debbie was almost half an hour late. A girl named Mary Beth down the bar waved at him. “Hey, Skip,” she said. “What’s new with you?”
    “I need a job, and I need pussy,” Chris murmured in his ear.
    “Ah, man,” said Skip, putting down his beer on the bar with a thud. “Don’t talk like that. You’re too old for that kind of talk. That’s low. That’s just low, man.”
    “Fuck you, man. You’re pussy-whipped by that old woman. You never come to the bar, you’re never at Ed’s. You missed the demo derby. What the hell is it with that place? When I was a kid my aunt Patty used to pass around the food there at parties and she’d come home saying, ooh, the silverware, the flowers, the fucking lake. I bet you don’t fish in that lake, my man, because she’ll cut your heart out. Jimmy’s old man went out there once, and he pulled a twenty-two-inch brown trout out of that lake at six in the morning, and there she